mail attachment don't open in el capitan

yes, seems like many of us are having this problem. attachments don't open. email databases are lost etc.

we've got 2 identical machines sitting here. on one of them the email db was lost on the other it was not ost.

we can, sometimes send attachments successfully between machines.

pdfs work ok and so do zipped image files.

an emailed Pages document fails to open.

individual image files are hit and miss, in particular the iconed versions.

i spoke with an apple tech yesterday and for over an hour he 'examined' my mac remotely.

conclusion: no clue on why attachments could not be opened.

he had no idea on how to solve the problem

and, in fact, was a bit surprised that the problem existed.

i've tried the selected solutions on this forum to no avail.

...and so it goes

I tried your suggestion and opened in a new window several mails with attachments like .mp4, .pps, .pdf, and .jpg.

None of them opened.

I am glad it worked for you. My problem persists.

If the Apple tech. had no idea how to solve the problem, we are in deep.....

We have an expression that goes like this;

Treat with salt anything that could rot.

Beware of the day when salt begins to rot.

the problem is bigger than just the FUBAR email.

whatever 'features' they included in el capitan also borked the ebanking facility at the local bank.

ebanking has been been down for at least 2 weeks now for apple users that downgraded to eek capitan.

this up/downgrade has been somewhat of a disaster, i'd say.

Sadly, it my solution only worked a few times and then stopped again *sigh*. While I am overseas next week I am hoping that my internet connections will be good enough for me to have to keep going to my server to download the attachments that don't seem to work.

There is no rhyme or reason as to which files it effects, when or why. Some of the bad emails are a couple of hours old, so it's not just a matter of waiting for them to 'arrive'. I have also checked all my rules and - thanks Alun, I did find a couple had that odd move AND copy to a folder, so have fixed that.

I think the salt has rotted on this update for Mail Dr Bee! The ebanking is an absolute disaster too. Back to the drawing board......Happy Friday all (from Australia)

I have Adobe Acrobat Pro on two laptops. Mac #1 &Mac #2. When #1 receives an email with viewable and valid PDF and then forwards the email and PDF attachment to Mac #2, the email's PDF attachment on Mac#2 becomes unreadable. The work around is to open the PDF into Acrobat and then email file from Acrobat to #2 and that is successful on Mac #2.

Something in mail is corrupting the valid PDF attachment when it is forwarded in original email to Mac#2.

Here is the error message on Mac #2 when trying to open PDF attachment that was forwarded via email from Mail.

"Adobe Acrobat DC could not open 'PO4039023.pdf' because it is either not a supported file type or because the file has been damaged (for example, it was sent as an email attachment and wasn't correctly decoded).

To create an Adobe PDF document, go to the source application. Then choose Save as Adobe PDF from the PDF dropdown in the Print dialog."

My online banking still works, maybe you should talk to your bank.